Answers to Your Burning ServiceNow Questions

Once a month, Crossfuze opens up their doors of experience to anyone interested in learning about ServiceNow and the power of the platform to transform their organization. Each time we do a live ServiceNow demo for ITSM or CSM, we gather up the questions attendees asked and include them in this blog. So, be sure to bookmark this page so that you can stay in the conversation and learn from the curiosity of others in positions and situations similar to yours.

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Yes. Surveys are part of the platform. One of the most common ITSM-specific use cases for surveys is for rating employee satisfaction with how their request/ticket was handled by the Service Desk. You can build surveys into your ticket workflow so that they automatically get sent upon close of a ticket. Another example of how to use surveys is to send them out to all employees to get feedback about their experience with the Service Desk (or IT in general). There are many ways the survey feature can be used. And, because it’s all the same platform you get the same type of reporting and dashboards. So, if you can build a report on Incident, you can also build one for Problem or Change. All in all, it’s easy to set up surveys in ServiceNow.

Can you survey customers too?

You can. The Customer Service Management (CSM)application within ServiceNow comes with the capability to survey customers. Another great use of surveys with CSM is with your partners/vendors. There are all kinds of creative applications for that use case with reporting and other useful mechanisms to go along with that.

Yes. When you’re talking about Configuration Management Database within ServiceNow (CMDB is the ITIL term for that, and ServiceNow uses a lot of ITIL best practices), it can be populated in a variety of ways, for example, individual configuration items within your network. Let's say you’re using SCCM to gather information about all of your workstations and laptops that are in your networks. There's a plugin for SCCM that can attach to ServiceNow and can consume and map the data from SCCM into the appropriate database table within ServiceNow. Crossfuze has used that to populate CMDB. Oftentimes, you’ll have a scheduled job that runs and brings in data on a scheduled basis so it's up to date, and you'll have all that data available to you.

There are also other technologies that do scanning that can be used in the same way. You can also import from other database systems. As a side note, ServiceNow has a product called Discovery which will conduct scans on your other IP-discoverable devices. What these technologies collect and what can be brought in varies. However, the short answer is yes, you can integrate ServiceNow with SCCM and if you need help with getting that done, feel free to reach out to us.

Can you use ServiceNow for Discovery?

Yes, CMDB can hold data about your environment so ServiceNow can interact with the existing Discovery tools you have on your network such as SCCM, for example. If you don't have existing tools or the tools you do have are not used for Discovery as is, ServiceNow has a handy built-in discovery tool which can be configured to collect info on IP addressable resources on your network and then feed those into your CMDB automatically. You can set that up to scan each evening, for example, and then that can be used to keep your CMDB populated and up to date, and of course, you can also begin to map which resources depend on other resources and so on.

Does ServiceNow work with other systems? Can you provide some examples of how?

ServiceNow can interact with many other systems. Many systems that corporations use today have ServiceNow integrations that are pre-built and ready to go. Or, if you have a system that doesn’t already have an API to ServiceNow, you can turn to a partner like Crossfuze. We’ve worked closely with hundreds of companies to build custom integrations. ServiceNow integration is one of our core competencies.

ServiceNow has a fully documented API so you can use a REST API mechanism of interacting with other systems. We’ve built integrations for platforms such as Workday, JIRA, and Salesforce. A lot of the big platforms you've heard of interact and integrate in a one-or two-way type fashion, where you pass data back and forth. You may just want a one-way where that source updates ServiceNow or you may want to have two-way where, for example, you make a change in ServiceNow and that goes and updates the other system. Also on the data side, ServiceNow has what is called a mid-server. Without getting too far into the weeds on that, you have the ability to do ETO work - extract, transform, load - so you can get data from other sources. If it’s not necessarily a web service API, you can actually go into underlying databases and connect to those databases or connect queries that run against those databases, bring them into ServiceNow, map them, and transform them into the ServiceNow tables. This can be done in two different ways, 1. get the raw data, or 2. go through an API mechanism. There’s a lot more around integration best practices that we’d be happy to dive into with you if interested.